Disqus - Latest Comments for catbirdseat

Re: The Fine Line Between Informing and Spamming Your Followers

kidmercury — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:39:48 -0000

not sure this is necessarily a moral issue, in my opinion. black hat SEO, for instance, forces search engines to evolve and improve their algorithm. it's also tricky to define what exactly constitutes this type of "gaming" marketing versus legitimate marketing. something that is considered gaming today can be considered legitimate tomorrow -- i think music piracy is in the midst of undergoing that very type of transformation.

hype machine is creating this game. in my opinion the burden is on them to ensure the game is managed the way they want it to be. if they don't like the incentives they are creating, than they should simply not create them.

Re: The Fine Line Between Informing and Spamming Your Followers

fredwilson — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:20:10 -0000

Yes. Exactly. You wrote my post better than I did. That's what I wanted to say. Thanks!

Re: The Fine Line Between Informing and Spamming Your Followers

catbirdseat — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:17:20 -0000

(Fred, this is not directed at you -- I know you're a man of integrity, and do not blog/tweet shadily... )

With regard to the Hype Machine's Twitter list, I understand what you are saying about it having "game dynamics," but at the same time, I certainly hope that people DO NOT start thinking of it as "a game." Anthony created the Hype Machine Twitter list, just as he created Hype Machine proper, as a tool to help people discover the music that others felt passionate about. It's a social tool created to provide a real value, and as such needs to be founded on true, accurate data. Hype Machine (regardless of what the name may imply) was NOT created as a tool for bands or PR people to use to game promotion, nor was it created a means for blogs (or now, Twitterers) to brand-build for themselves. Exploiting Hype Machine like this lessens its value to *everybody*, and is the root of Anthony's recent problems with Hypem "spam" detailed in his "On Chart Integrity" blog posts ( blog.hypem.com ). In the same way that Black Hat SEO tricks devalue the search experience for everyone, so blogging/tweeting a song from a gaming/promotion motivation devalues Hype Machine entirely. I don't think there's any sort of fine line between spamming and informing-- it always seems perfectly obvious to me which is which.

I think that those of us who grow to wield more influence than the average online Joe need to be much more aware of what we're posting and why. We should be adding value to the online experience-- and not value for the one (the one asking you to post/tweet), but value for everybody.

Re: SoundCtrl Speech: Change in Music Industry

albert — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:59:19 -0000

Definitely will keep blogging about it. I am pretty sure that we will see great businesses come out of all of this -- whether or not venture funded.

Re: SoundCtrl Speech: Change in Music Industry

catbirdseat — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:17:45 -0000

As someone who's been observing this stuff from a waist-deep perspective for years now, I have to say that for an "outsider," you certainly talk a lot of perfect sense and insight!

Sadly, it looks like they're not letting any more people in for this event tonight, so do a favor for those of us that can't attend: keep blogging about music here on continuations. :-)

(Between you and Fred, it's starting to look like USV must be one of the most music-intelligent and -saavy VC firms out there-- which makes it all the more unfortunate that no music ventures seem to have a good solid plan for revenue as yet)

Re: Mike Barthel's Tumblr - You know what? Hiring some kids to revolutionize...

barthel — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:26:48 -0000

Well, the post itself seemed to be more concerned with how he uses advisers and how information gets to him, and in that regard I'm not sure how a new system would help. I'm just saying that there's a pretty gigantic literature on this stuff that he does not seem to be familiar with, and he's drawing this rather facile comparison with GWB.

Re: Mike Barthel's Tumblr - You know what? Hiring some kids to revolutionize...

catbirdseat — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:53:57 -0000

I guess unless you are familiar with Umair's ongoing and consistently brilliant writing, it's easy to take this quote out of context and assume he's saying something to the effect of, "GET DEM TWITTER KIDZ AND TUBMLR BOYZ AND FACEBOOKERS, DEY CAN FIX TEH ECONOMY." In fact, what he is saying is that Obama took the presidency in part because he was willing to look outside all the established channels of campaign ing, and instead do something 'revolutionary'-- while w/r/t this economy, he is doing nothing *remotely close* to doing anything 'revolutionary,' he is still try to fix a broken old system by using broken old system methods. Haque doesn't want Obama to look to "tech" or "online" people to fix the economy-- he wants him to take on a "new" approach to the economy instead of trying to use "old" rules to fix it.

Re: offnotesnotes - Is This The Worst Blog Post Of All Time?

offnotesnotes — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:47:29 -0000

you be da man, gary vaynerchuk.

kindly direct me toward dr. kevorkian, ryan catbird.

Re: offnotesnotes - Is This The Worst Blog Post Of All Time?

catbirdseat — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:21:19 -0000

That sounds exactly like something that would come out of Gary Vaynerchuk's mouth. It's almost as good as this:

http://garyvaynerchuk.com/post/78888436/the-tec...

Almost.

Re: disqus

catbirdseat — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:12:34 -0000

Your comments just killed my dog.

Re: offnotesnotes - “The perception of music criticism seems to have...

catbirdseat — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:16:27 -0000

Actually, people really do seem to want Carles to be some sort of top-secret fake identity/pseudonym, as in Gerard Vs. Bear, but he's a *real* dude-- it says right in one of the comments of the HRO site that his name is Carlos Lopez, and, FWIW, he's a 2007 Tulane graduate with a degree in business.

Re: yvynyl

PovertyJetSet — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:40:49 -0000

Mwuahahaha! I mess weeth your heeed!

Actually, I'm surprised to hear that the record has been out for 6 months! Haha. Here I am thinking it was brand new. Guess I really didn't know. Seriously, tho, these guys are an amazing live act! Go see them!

Re: yvynyl

catbirdseat — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:24:46 -0000

I'm a little bit totally freaked out right now because this song, inexplicably, popped into my head a few hours ago despite me not having listened to the record for a good 6 months. So the odds of you posting this seem kind of out there. Please stop fucking with me psychically.

Re: offnotesnotes - the frustrating overabundance of unnecessarily...

catbirdseat — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:07:56 -0000

B-but where would RCRD LBL be without those endless remixes?

(Answer: it wouldn't)

Re: offnotesnotes - Japandroids: "Young Hearts Spark Fire" [MP3/Stream] | Pitchfork

catbirdseat — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:53:50 -0000

I wanted to like this, but to me, that drumming sounds very much not good-- so much so that I thought I'd accidentally opened 2 copies of the file that were playing out of sync.

Also, "David Prowse" is the guy who played Darth Vader-- this probably ain't the same guy, huh?

Re: offnotesnotes - Japandroids: "Young Hearts Spark Fire" [MP3/Stream] | Pitchfork

offnotesnotes — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:02:24 -0000

i love that i am not the only person who thought of Vader-- wish I had
mentioned that.

drumming is definitely messy and all over the place, like on an old graham
coxon solo record, although i don't think it's out of sync. sounds great to
me. if the drums didn't have this manic energy to them, i don't think i
would like the song as much. japandroids is very much two guys
loudly/haphazardly emoing out, communicating straight to the audience w/ no
time to clean shit like that up (they're worried about dying, for
crissakes!).

Re: offnotesnotes - One of the most unique sounding new bands of the...

catbirdseat — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:44:54 -0000

I've avoided bands for worse reasons, I guess....

- their top Myspace friends
- being hyped by the blogs ______, ______, or ______
- being from L.A.

Re: offnotesnotes - One of the most unique sounding new bands of the...

catbirdseat — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:23:12 -0000

Now there's a band who (very unfairly, I'm sure) I've steered clear of solely because of their name.

I feel a bit bad about that, but know that I would likely do the same for "Zissou and the Life Aquatics," "Diablo and the Junos," or "Miranda and the Me and You and Everyone We Know."

Re: offnotesnotes - One of the most unique sounding new bands of the...

offnotesnotes — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:26:17 -0000

Not unfairly! Quoting that mostly in astonishment at the band being labeled
"most unique."

Re: Mike Barthel's Tumblr - When gasoline prices peaked in July, says Edmunds,...

catbirdseat — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 11:07:19 -0000

Businessweek is an asshole, then.

Re: incidentals and accidentals - DJ Martian's Page: Uncut Magazine Top 50 Albums of 2008

catbirdseat — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:52:35 -0000

I don't know how you can possibly resist the inexorable pleasantness of "Skinny Love!"

Re: I Guess I'm Doing Something Wrong

catbirdseat — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:22:07 -0000

Kidmercury is 100% correct. We will not see the "revolution" until we get past this CPM/CPC pricing fixation. In this day and age, I can't see how valuing something based solely on the gross number of eyeballs looking at it could possibly be the best methodology. I would think that having 100 users who were really interested, active, and engaged with an advertiser would be worth a lot more than having 10,000 DISinterested users briefly glancing at an obnoxious banner ad.

Believing in CPM as a great model isn't far from believing in mass spam mailing as a great model; they're both based on the same principle: club as many people as possible over the head with your message, and hope you can get 1% to respond. The advertisers who recognize that the future isn't about brute force -- it's about targeting and engaging the consumers who *want* to be engaged -- those are the advertisers who will survive and thrive. The rest can go live in our spam boxes.

Re: muxfind

catbirdseat — Sun, 25 May 2008 11:35:53 -0000

One has to assume that 'Search' is such an obvious and easy-to-implement feature for Muxtape that Justin must have *intentionally* left it out of the feature set. Sure, Search is a great tool for us users, but isn't this just going to attract more industry heat on Muxtape?

Re: Fluxtumblr

catbirdseat — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:39:45 -0000

These are all fair points, but if an album is a 9 it should get a 9

Execept for those times when the Pitchfork higher-ups declare that the writer isn't "allowed" to give it a 9.

Re: Welcome to the Outsidr

outsidr — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:10:09 -0000

Well it sounds like we are in very similar situations indeed, and I apreciate your readership. Perhaps we'll help each other out down the road - my hope is that I can raise enough interesting points over the coming months to see this blog become a sounding board of sorts.

There is so much potential out there, quite obviously. What we currently experience on the internet will be obsolete in a couple of years, replaced by the next wave of ideas like yours and mine. The only question is whether or not we have the goods to bring our ideas to market and guide them through the transitional phase that Web 2.0 with no doubt birth. It's us or it's "them" - but it will happen regardless. Best of luck to you!